If you have a profile that you frequently like to visit on Instagram on your iPhone, the quickest way to get there is via an URL scheme. The IG profile for Beyonce is http://instagram.com/beyonce, but if you tap on the following URL, it will bring you straight to her profile in the app: instagram://user?username=beyonce.

I keep a list of favorite IG profiles in Drafts but you can also put these links in a launcher like Launch Center Pro.

To automate the conversion of the profile URL to the URL scheme, I have written two URL actions. To make this work, you will need Drafts, Launch Center Pro, and TextTool. (By the way, I am currently using Drafts 3. If you are using Drafts 4, then please adjust the URL action accordingly -- put a 4 after drafts.)

This action splits the profile URL at the / in TextTool, so that the username ends up on the 4th line. Then the output is sent to Drafts. You can install this action or create an URL action called ig-clipboard:

drafts:///create?text={{(instagram://user?username=[[line|4]])}}

This wraps line 4 of the draft in the IG URL scheme. I surround it by parens in case I want to precede it with square brackets to make it a Markdown link.

How to Make It Work

After you install these two actions, just copy an IG user profile to your clipboard, and tap on the IG-clipboard action in LCP. The conversion happens automatically, and you'll end up with the URL scheme in Drafts.

Foo Fighters is one of my favorite rock bands. I have been listening to Sonic Highways this week, and it just feels uninspired to me. The best hooks seem to be lifted from The Beatles or Jethro Tull. I suspect that Dave Grohl couldn't even bring himself to record another Foo Fighters album unless he built it around a documentary (which I haven't seen, because I don't have cable). I hope I am proven wrong after future listens, but I suspect that the Foo Fighters have lost their edge.

A couple of weeks ago I dropped my iPad mini and the screen cracked. I work in Manhattan, and although there are many local services that will repair screens, I was looking for an affordable solution -- over $150 seems like a of money to spend to replace a screen, given that I can get an entire Amazon Fire tablet for that price.

I eventually went with i99repair.com, because their price was only $110, and I found a $5 discount code on their Facebook business page. (In fact, I only felt comfortable enough to mail my iPad to Iowa because the Facebook comments assuaged my anxiety that i99repair might have been a scam.)

After I paid, the email receipt stated that I would be notified once they received my iPad. I shipped it First Class (with tracking code) for under $15. i99repair received it on a Saturday, but I did not hear from them. I left a voicemail in the middle of the following week, and having not received a reply, I emailed them. They replied that they received it and were almost done with it. That Friday, I received an automated email with a USPS tracking code for the shipped, repaired iPad. I received it the following Tuesday.

Excited, I opened my package, only to find that the Home button did not work. (The square on the Home button is even slightly askew.) I emailed i99repair about this, and they wrote, Ok send it back. (I have since replied, asking if they would pay for shipping, and as of this writing have not received a response.)

The screen replacement is fine, although there is a small speck underneath it which I know wasn't there before.

Needless to say, I was upset. I did some googling and found that there is a virtual button that can be activated via Assistive Touch, which can be found in Accessibility under the Settings > General. It is a persistent icon that overlays the screen, and that can be dragged just about anywhere. When I tap on it, I can tap on Home or activate Siri or access Control Center or Notification Center.

One thing I learned being without my iPad mini for 1.5 weeks is that I really love my iPad. I didn't particularly like reading The New Yorker on my iPhone while on the subway. So I had to decide: re-ship my still-broken iPad to Iowa and be without it for another 1.5 weeks, or just use it with Assistive Touch. For the past few days, I have been using the virtual button, and have been OK with it. I do the four finger upward swipe to switch between frequently-used apps, so I rarely have to go Home to open an app. And I rarely use Siri on my iPad anyway.

All in all, I regret having sent my iPad to i99repair.com, and I would not recommend them. Their reply to my complaint was rude, and they shouldn't have even sent my iPad back to me with a non-functioning Home button in the first place. If they had replied with something to the effect of, "I am so sorry that we made a mistake. Please mail it back (we will compensate you for shipping) and we will make it a priority to fix the problem," I would have felt much better about the situation.

To get the embed code, go to a track on the desktop site (make sure it's not a playlist); click on the Share button; click on the Embed tab; and copy the code within the Code & Preview box and copy it to your clipboard. Paste it into the text area in my script, click the button, and get the URL scheme.

I have not done many test cases; I am assuming all track IDs are the same length. If this script doesn't work for you, please report in the comments section.

Yesterday I blogged about opening links from TTYtter for PERL in Lynx while running the app over SSH. This morning I decided to just run the app locally on my work computer. Due to IT restrictions, I don't have access to .profile, so I just downloaded the text file to a local directory, changed the name of the file to twitter, made it executable by typing chmod +x twitter, and went through the OAuth process. Now while in that directory I can just type ./twitter to run the app.

A benefit of running the app on my local machine is that I can open URLs in a GUI web browser. The developer suggests that MAC OS X users can /set the urlopen parameter to open %U. For work reasons, my default browser is not the browser I use for personal browsing, so I went into the text file, and changed

$urlopen ||= 'echo %U';

to

$urlopen ||= 'open -a "Google Chrome" %U';

Now I can just type /url followed by the thread ID, and the first link in the tweet will open in Chrome.

I'm so glad that v4 of Drafts runs as a separate app than v3, and that they use distinct URL schemes. I can use v3 on my iPad to sync via Simperium with my iPhone (which I have not upgraded to iOS8) and still be able to play with the new iOS8-only version on my iPad.

TTYtter is a Linux command-line app for Twitter. I use it over SSH while at the office, so (as far as I can tell) I cannot open links into a GUI browser from within the app.

In TTYtter, one types /url followed by an alphanumeric string to open the first link mentioned in a tweet. By default, /url is set to echo %U which just "prints" the URL out in the terminal. This is not very useful. One can set the value by typing /set urlopen followed by the app in which one wants to view the URL. I have been typing /set urlopen lynx --accept-all-cookies %U at the beginning of every session, but this gets tiresome.

I know nothing of PERL, but I know that this app is just one big executable text file. So I just opened it in a text editor, searched for urlopen and changed

$urlopen ||= 'echo %U';

to

$urlopen ||= 'lynx --accept-all-cookies %U';

Now I can view the link in the Lynx browser (and without having to accept cookies each and every time) without having to set the variable again.